Flea and ticks — help!

For the third or tenth or something year in a row, we are really struggling for flea and tick control. I think I’ve tried every herbal and non-poisonous method out there, and none of it came close to dealing with it.

I grew flea bane in our pastures. I’ve lined the dogs areas with a variety of herbs. I’ve tried DE and garlic and brewer’s yeast.

Then I tried drugs. Every single brand will work for maybe one cycle, and then stops. I have 6 dogs, a cat and sheeps and lots of birds.

We have to rotate them all very early, much earlier than designed, and it’s tricky, because we are poisoning the dogs and it’s easy to do too much too fast. We’ve only had the reaction once, but are so careful to watch for it again.

NH is number 2 in the nation for Lyme’s disease right now. I pull ticks off the dogs and myself every single day. It drives me nuts to see the dogs bothered, so it’s a horrible cycle to get into.

Help!

5 thoughts on “Flea and ticks — help!”

  1. Like you, we deal with fleas and ticks every year. We now have only two cats and a dog, but once the season starts its as if we have a dozen each. The only way we’ve been able to keep ahead of the ticks in particular, is to use advantage and frontline alternatively every three weeks. And you are right, it is poison and it makes me a bit freaky everytime i put the stuff on. But we are adding guinea hens to our yard this year with the hope that they will help.
    I hope you come up with a good plan that works out for everybody.

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  2. A regular flea/tick/lice/fly/mosquito medicine, we use Liberty 50 on our dogs. The main ingredient is a pyrethrin derivative. We only have to apply it every six weeks and our dogs stay completely parasite free. It does take about a week to work the first time, but then there are no parasites at all. The company that makes it also makes a similar product for horses, I don’t know whether they make one for sheep or not. I do completely understand wanting to use natural methods; sometimes we have to give in for the health of our animals though.

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  4. Several years ago we took in a dog from a friend because the friend had cancer and was dying so he couldn’t take care of all his dogs. Unfortunately that dog brought us fleas. For over a year we tried all sorts of things from plantings to brushing, to baths, to DE, to ‘anti-flea’ chemical baths all to no avail. In desperation after over a year and a half of this we finally tried Advantix II K9. A week later there were no fleas to be found on the dogs and just the occasional random flea in the area. After a month we could find no fleas at all. It works.

    My brother had a dog with a lot of ticks. The Advantix also got rid of the dog’s ticks so it works for those too. The package warns it is lethal to fish but our fish seem fine. The dogs love to dive into the fish pond – not that they ever catch any fish.

    I don’t like ‘cides’ but nothing else was doing the job and the problem was getting worse. A very judicial application solved the problem.

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